


Laid To Waste

by Jenwryn



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e04 The Exodus Pt 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-21
Updated: 2008-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I don't think you really understand. But then, I don't really expect you to.</p><p>Gaeta's PoV; first-person.</p><p>Tag to Episode 03.04 (The Exodus, Pt.4).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laid To Waste

**Author's Note:**

> Episode 03.04 really annoyed me, I have to say! This one-shot was written just a little time after having watched that.
> 
> "Do your duty, and leave the outcome to the gods" comes from _Horace_ (act 2, sc.8), by Pierre Cornielle. "Faites votre devoir et laissez faire aux dieux" is the French original.
> 
> Unbeta'd.

_The hand that signed that signed the paper felled a city…_ _  
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever;_ _  
And famine grew, and locusts came;_ _  
Great is the hand that holds dominion over_ _  
Man by a scribbled name._

~ Dylan Thomas, ‘The hand that signed the paper felled a city’, 1936.

*

I don’t think you really understand. But then, I don’t see as how you could be expected to understand. I know I certainly don’t. The events, perhaps, are still too close to home. The chroniclers will have noises to make about it when the future rolls around to become the present; gods willing. You can barely imagine how much I long for the second-guessing of third-generation historians, long for it, call it on, plea for it in my sleeping prayers. Because to be second-guessed by them means that we have survived; means that we have made it through the quagmire of our own delusions. Made it, somehow, though the possibility of it is beyond my conception. I have already said that I don’t understand. It’s the truth. I don’t.

But I do know we can’t go on like this. Too many of our sins are self-created. As we live we each of us gain scars – some of them life gives us, and some of them we give ourselves. It just seems to me that more are self-inflicted nowadays then they used to be. Or perhaps my perspective has merely changed. Do your duty, they taught us, and leave the outcome to the gods. But they forgot that guilt is a well-spread blanket more than welcome to offer shelter to even those without a will for it. They forgot that there is a strength to the power of a name upon paper. My name on paper. A death list spread out on a table. His name signed, my complicity, his name signed and my name pledged in his service. Respect once given cannot be assuaged by the pointing of a gun.

All I know is that it hurts too much to have been fooled and to have been made to realise – what is it he said? – what were the words? (watching him there, day by day, drinking and smoking and whoring away our democracy, our civilisation, our very rights to exist)… _idealist._That was the word. That was what I was called. And you know for a moment there it felt like a dirty word. A dirty word… how can a word like idealist seem to be tainted so much? What kind of world are we living in where the bearing of dreams turns you into some kind of utopian fool? Or perhaps the world was always like that. Perhaps I spent all those years buried in my studies, wanting nothing more than to be an officer, wanting nothing more than that spot in the CIC of the _Galactica_, listening to life tick-tick-ticking around me… I spent all those years and never realised that what I missed most was the warmth of my own ideals.

Once upon a time, I would have said that it’s ideals that keep us human. Ideals, great dreams, the goals, the faith, the wonderings, those were the things that set us apart from machines, the things that drew the line between us and the cylon. But see, I’ve spent too long in their presence. Cylon collaborator, they called me, and perhaps I was. Perhaps the little I did wasn’t enough, perhaps I should have gone out blazing like Starbuck would have done; perhaps I should have bit the bullet and ended it all in a flash of glory. But that’s not me, you know? And I spent too long in their presence not to know better – I know that in reality, they’re just as idealistic as we are. Maybe they’re even more so. Half of their bickering seems to be revolved around some existential flaw in their Great Plan. What is that plan, anyway? Maybe they don’t know. Maybe like me they’re chasing some idyllic utopia that doesn’t exist, can’t exist.

You know, I read once, in a book, somewhere, that there’s no such thing as a living utopia – that once a utopia leaves the realm of the dream and begins to be put into practise, it’s a utopia no more, but just another plan, another goal, another set of outlines, just another thing that we want to drag kicking and screaming into life any old way possible. Maybe I _am_ an idealist, and maybe the cause is lost for us all, because maybe the ideal can never become reality: the utopia can never remain utopia. The dream can never be fleshed with bone. Maybe that was the greatest mistake the cylon ever made; to think that they could be like us without our flaws.

Only the being without ideals can avoid their destruction.

Only he who cares not at all is never hurt.


End file.
